Actions: What You Can Do To Improve The Urban Experience

How can playful actions be used to improve our urban experience?

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), an international research centre and museum founded in 1979 on the conviction that architecture is a public concern, has set out to answer this question with its most recent exhibit, Actions: What You Can Do With the City. The exhibit presents 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Among the 99 actions are a few thought-provoking projects targeted to the production of food and possibilities of urban agriculture. Here are some of my favorites.

#82: Megapicnic Takes Streets with City Produce

A market and massive “continuous” picnic held to show how urban food production and public space can be combined advantageously in central London. Produce grown inside the metropolitan London limits was judged and displayed, followed by a picnic that occupied two large parks and a connecting corridor. The Continuous Picnic project was a demonstration of a planning strategy called “Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes,” or CPULs, developed by the architects Katherine Bohn and Andre Viljoen. The proposal is for low-intensity urban farming integrated with the city to create continuous green channels that serve as productive gardens. Packs of native seeds were distributed at the Continuous Picnic along with recycled blankets that doubled as posters for the event.

#26. Corn Restores Land-Use Diversity

An urban agriculture project that sought to reconnect residents of Los Angeles with their natural environment. Not a Cornfield was a 13-hectare cornfield planted to remediate an industrial brownfield. Seeding, maintenance, and harvesting were organized to involve locals from all over the city, establishing links to water and seasonal cycles that are otherwise obscured by the city’s concrete infrastructure. The site is gradually becoming a state park, and the project led to the creation of Farmlab, an interdisciplinary studio in Los Angeles. The South Central Farm was bulldozed at almost the same time as Not a Cornfield was created. This event created a surplus of fertile land and established fruit trees that had to be moved to be saved – several Farmlab projects thus emerged including: Agbins, recycled boxes containing rich soil from the South Central Farm, and Junker Gardens, a proposal for using car wrecks as gardening containers.

#27. Shipping Pallets Grow Community

Two ‘social construction’ projects directed by the atelier d’architecture autogérée for neighborhoods in Paris that lacked green space. ECOinterstice: An energy-independent recycled construction garden and building inserted in a paved alley between two buildings in the Sainte-Blaise neighbourhood of Paris 20e, this “participatory garden” includes mini-plots for local residents and is designed as a continuous construction site programmed by the community. ECObox: A warehouse in the La Chapelle neighbourhood, transformed into a community garden. Recycled shipping pallets were laid on the pavement and filled with dirt to create a soil bed. Residents selected their own plots and the building was opened for community events.

Related posts:

1. Report Recommends Policies to Improve Access to Healthy Food in Cities
2. Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens
3. Exploration into the Role of Design in the Urban Food Movement – UW Panel Presentation and Charette

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